Schools are going high-tech to keep track of attendance and to send out the notifications alert to parents if they children are late or absent.
Some school use smartphone apps or online portals to mark students attendance. While other use either biometric or card system to keep track of student’s attendance. Biometric system like fingerprint machine or facial recognition machine can prevent mis-used like buddy punching.
eHR fingerprint attendance system understands that a teacher’s role during assembly includes taking all the students attendance and also notifying parents who are not in school. More schools are taking the initiative to install such a system in place of roll-calls to ease the teachears workload. Some schools even require teachers to call them by a certain time to find the cause of absenteeism, while some notify by SMS.
In 2010, only about 20 schools had in place the biometric electronic systems that log attendance. The biometric systems like fingerprint machine are favored among teachers as it cuts down the time spent for attendance taking by up to 90%. Within minutes from the time students are supposed to be checked in, the eHR time attendance system identify the absentees and latecomers and send a text message or app notification to keep parents informed.
In the past, teachers used to manually call or send text messages to the parents individually in the morning.
“Teachers use the time saved to interact more with the students or to start the day’s lessons.”, principal said.
For example, some parents had noticed a marked increase in the number of children arriving late on certain days. “We probed deeper and found that it was because students could not get on a certain bus service which was often crowded and full.”. The parent feedback to the Land Transport Authority soon to see if the frequency of that bus service can be increased.
“It is an easy and fast way of alerting us and it gives us a sense of assurance that we will know if anything is amiss,” said housewife Jenny Mak, 51, who has a son in secondary school.
